We are excited to introduce AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles for EC2 instances, a new feature that makes it even easier for your applications to securely access AWS service APIs from EC2 instances. Now you can create an IAM role, which has a set of permissions, and launch EC2 instances with the IAM role. You can launch individual EC2 instances or use Auto Scaling or AWS CloudFormation to launch a fleet of instances with IAM roles.

AWS access keys with the specified permissions are automatically made available on EC2 instances that have been launched with an IAM role. IAM roles for EC2 instances manages the muck of securely distributing your AWS access keys out to your EC2 instances so that you can focus on what matters to you most – your application.